Title:GTA Spotlight: Adam Twardowski (G’18)

Meet Adam Twardowski (G’18), a Public Policy Manager on Meta’s U.S. policy team.

How did your time at Georgetown influence your career path in the tech industry?

I came to Georgetown expecting to build a career in government, ideally in the Foreign Service or the intelligence community. Moving from Minnesota to Washington to pursue a master’s in Security Studies felt like a natural step. The program gave me a foundation in national security and international affairs, including the growing role of technology. I also came to appreciate Georgetown’s Jesuit emphasis on service and connecting your work to something larger than yourself. That has stayed with me.

Career paths rarely unfold exactly as planned. The government opportunities I had hoped for became harder to find, and after a few years in the think tank world, I began asking where else I could do the kind of work that had brought me to Washington.

Someone encouraged me to consider a technology company. That helped me see how central tech companies had become debates about security, economic growth, and international relations, and how much they needed people who understood those issues and brought a sense of public purpose to their work. It was a turning point. I hadn’t arrived at Georgetown imagining a career in tech, but the education prepared me for it in ways I only fully appreciated later.

What are your top priorities in your current role?

I help manage Meta’s relationships with the diplomatic community in Washington as part of our U.S. policy team. My priority is to build productive, lasting relationships that help us understand governments’ priorities and explain our work clearly. Those conversations can cover legislation and regulation, investment, partnerships, or specific issues affecting our operations.

Much of my week involves engaging with embassies, hosting visiting officials, and participating in forums and roundtables with ambassadors and ministers. I also work with colleagues around the world to support engagement with the State Department. It’s a two-way conversation: sometimes we reach out, and sometimes governments come to us.

The common thread is trust. A global company has to earn it through candid conversations, responsiveness, and respect for the responsibilities governments carry. You can’t build that only when a difficult issue arises. It develops over time, through the ordinary work of listening, following up, and being someone people can reach. When a harder conversation comes, having that relationship already in place makes a real difference.

Earlier, I served on the staff of the Meta’s last President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg. I helped him with his external engagements, and had memorable opportunities to travel with him and learn from him up close.

You are kind of like a diplomat for Meta. How has your experience in the School of Foreign Service impacted how you go about your work?

The breadth of the School of Foreign Service education has been especially valuable. My work can move from content policy to data infrastructure to energy, sometimes within the same conversation. I work with colleagues who bring deep expertise to each of those areas; my role is to understand how the issues connect and explain them clearly to different audiences. The curriculum’s range, from international relations and regional studies to technology, trained me to get up to speed quickly and place a specific issue in its broader context. That matters when a question comes up in a conversation with an ambassador or a minister. You need to respond thoughtfully, know when to draw on a colleague’s expertise, and follow through. Georgetown helped me develop the breadth and habits of learning that this work requires.

How do you navigate the tension between rapid technological innovation and slower global policy, especially when various governments have different expectations for the future?

I start by recognizing that companies and governments have different responsibilities and often work on different timelines. New technologies can develop quickly, while public institutions need time to consult, weigh competing interests, and build consensus. The challenge is to keep the conversation useful as the technology evolves. That makes sustained engagement essential: companies need to explain what their technology can and cannot do, listen to concerns, and help policymakers understand the choices ahead.

Governments also approach these questions from different economic, political, and legal contexts. A conversation about data infrastructure or AI may start from very different priorities depending on the country. Much of my job is translation: helping each side understand what the other is saying and finding areas where we can make progress. That takes patience, familiarity with the local context, and a willingness to ask questions.

What do you wish more people knew about the tech industry?

I wish more people could see the range of experience and the seriousness of the debate inside a technology company. I work with people who have backgrounds in government, law, research, and engineering, and who bring different perspectives to difficult questions. Some of those conversations have been as rigorous as anything I encountered in the think tank world, where I had spent a few years. Seeing that up close challenged some of my own assumptions about the industry.

I also think the public conversation benefits from more curiosity and fewer easy conclusions. Technology raises real questions about how we live, work, and govern ourselves, and those questions deserve scrutiny. The habits Georgetown encourages — reading the original source, testing an argument, and distinguishing evidence from assertion — are useful whether you’re enthusiastic about a technology or skeptical of it. Those habits can lead people to different conclusions; what matters is the quality of the reasoning.

Finally, this is an industry where you have to keep learning. My own work has changed dramatically since I joined Meta in 2022, particularly as AI has become more central. For anyone considering a career in tech, curiosity and adaptability are part of the job.

What is your favorite app or website, and why?

At the moment, it’s Muse, Meta’s new personal AI agent. What interests me is the ability to move from answering a question to helping carry out a task. With the apps you choose to connect, it can help turn something you’ve been putting off into a plan and work through the steps with you.

For a student, the appeal is easy to imagine: organizing an internship search, keeping track of deadlines, or preparing a research plan. I’m interested in how these tools can give people more time for the parts of their work and lives that matter most to them.

My policy instincts also make me interested in user control. Muse lets people choose which apps to connect and how much access to give it, and it asks for approval before sensitive actions such as sending an email or making a purchase. As agents take on more tasks, being able to understand and direct what they do will be essential to trust.

What is one quick piece of advice you would give to a Georgetown student that is interested in tech?

Build enough technical fluency to connect technology to real problems. You don’t have to become an AI engineer, but you should understand the basic concepts and get practical experience using the tools. Start with something concrete in your own work: a research project, an internship, or a student organization. Learn where AI helps, where it falls short, and how to check its output. Being able to translate new capabilities into something useful for an organization is a valuable skill.

And take your liberal arts education seriously. The ability to absorb information, make connections, write clearly, and build relationships is central to my work. As AI becomes more capable, I believe those skills will matter even more. Georgetown gives you an opportunity to develop them; make the most of it.

For more GTA Alumni Spotlights, click here.